A doctor who survived cancer and chemotherapy says death cap mushroom poisoning was the most painful ordeal she has ever had. Dr Anna Whitehead saw some mushrooms near an oak tree in Raglan on the Easter long weekend. The Waikato public health doctor hadn’t planned to forage but decided to pick the mushrooms and check online if the ones she’d found near the waterfront on Cliff St were toxic. But she was so busy, partly due to commitments during the coronavirus pandemic, she forgot to check. She fried two mushroom caps and a stem, ate them with fish at lunch and felt fine – for a while. She woke up at 3am the next day. “I had this vomit which was unusual. It was a green liquid.” She went back to sleep but woke up again, and had “a huge amount” of green diarrhoea and vomit. “By eight in the morning I thought: I’m actually really unwell.”
